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Today, the Javaero is lucky to receive from its founding member, Aurelio Pascual, Jr., a Digital Projector. We used to rent digital projectors for our Javaero sessions, especially during our out-of-town sessions. Now we have our very own. This will go a long way to more productive sessions!
If you recently purchased a laptop or desktop computer, chances are you have a dual core system. There does not seem to be any indication anymore of us going back to single core unless some technological breakthrough will break the power barrier of CPUs. This means that more and more people will have a high powered computer in their homes without any idea how to harness such power.
What does it mean to have a dual processor? On first impulse, you probably will think it will speed up the execution of your programs. You would probably perceive a significant difference between the response time of your programs in a single core versus a dual core. But why do programs run faster in dual processor systems? For one thing, the speed of each processor is faster as compared to older single processors. The other thing is due to symmetric multiprocessing. An analogy of the dual processor system is a bank with 2 tellers and having a single line for customers. When a teller is done with one customer, it will get the next customer from the line. You can read about the performance of multiprocessor systems in this article.
There is another way you can make use of multiprocessors to make your programs run faster. This is through parallel programming. Parallel computing has been around for a long time already but are usually confined to university laboratories or supercomputing facilities. It has not caught the interest of the common people because they have no access to such machines. However, the future is already about multi-processing. More and more of these machines will reach the masses. This means that highly talented members of the masses get to experiment with parallel computing on a day-to-day basis. We are in for another revolution in computing. Are you ready for this revolution?
The Javaero.Org was one of the sponsors of the 10th International Conference of Molecular Systems Biology held last February 25 in UP Diliman, Quezon City.
From wikipedia:
Systems biology is a relatively new biological study field that focuses on the systematic study of complex interactions in biological systems, thus using a new perspective (integration instead of reduction) to study them. Particularly from year 2000 onwards, the term is used widely in the biosciences, and in a variety of contexts. Because the scientific method has been used primarily toward reductionism, one of the goals of systems biology is to discover new emergent properties that may arise from the systemic view used by this discipline in order to understand better the entirety of processes that happen in a biological system.
Javaero supported this conference in their own little way for the advancement of science and technology in the Philippines.
